Companies, other enterprises, and other groups of individuals use electronic “virtual” collaboration solutions, such as the EMC Documentum eRoom™ product available from EMC Corporation of Hopkinton, Mass., to manage and complete key projects including client engagements, proposal development, new product development, product lifecycle management, issues management, and business planning. In some cases, such collaboration solutions have been integrated with and/or include content management functionality to create a virtual workspace where all the materials related to a project—all documents, e-mails, task lists, discussions etc. may be stored. Typically, such solutions enable varying degrees of access to project-related content information to be afforded to IT administrators; executives; managers of multiple projects, e.g., related to a product and/or functional area; members of a project team; clients; and partners irrespective of their geographic location.
To work collaboratively on a project, typically it is necessary and/or desirable for team members, managers, clients and partners to always have the latest status on their projects at all times. There is also a need for program managers to have the latest status of all their programs at all times and also for individual project managers to have an updated status of their individual projects as well as the latest inputs or instructions from their program managers about their individual projects. Typically, collaboration solutions did not provide access to such information within the context of the collaboration solution itself.
In some cases, a separate project-planning module that was non-collaborative in nature has been used in conjunction with a collaboration solution, which facilitating keeping track of project status information. Typically, using such an approach project plans for each project are created separately using a project planning software, such as Microsoft Office Project™ available from Microsoft™ Corporation, and storing the project plan, e.g., as a version control document, in the virtual collaborative workspace provided by the collaboration solution. To check project status, a user needed to access this module in addition to any project planning modules included and/or integrated with the collaboration solution. In some cases, a user could create within a collaboration solution a separate module using a database feature with a standard view, but users were still required to go to this module to access project updates.
Therefore, there was a need for a common hierarchical integrated solution to generate project status reports for users.